


Ardor

by orphan_account



Category: Captain Underpants Series - Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)
Genre: Egg Casserole, F/M, I truly am pleased with how this came out though, WELL looks like the pining is going to go on a bit longer since she's not going to be in season 1, but eh- this is what fandoms are for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 09:59:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14850638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Benjamin Krupp, professional angry bastard and perfectionistic micromanager, finally comes to terms with the one thing he can't control; his feelings about Edith.





	Ardor

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of a prequel to Catchin' Feels, a super short drabble that can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13951113/chapters/32311194
> 
> Ack, so this was fun. Love me some sad middle-aged man.  
> This was asked for by Pieduck, and I was more than happy to deliver. Besides, it feels like it's been ages since I had a chance to write. Hopefully this summer I'll have time again, though the Master's classes... will make things tight.  
> (Also gonna miss Edith in season 1 but hey, again, that's what fandoms are for) 
> 
> Enjoy!

      He should have been home.

      That was what kept Benjamin Krupp moving, kept him bitter and seething to the point of nearly frothing at the mouth with every slam of a door, every pound of the keyboard. Outside, the sun was barely visible through a thick veil of December grey, throwing the room into a sort of subcategory of glow as the snow, falling and covering everything in sight, reflected the light to be caught and bounced between the white tiled ceiling and white tiled floor of his office. It played tricks on the eyes, on time, and every instance he cracked his hip off of his desk, or hit his hand on something he swore was farther away, he would curse and check the clock, only to see that not even five minutes had passed since the last time he had checked and prayed the day was over.

      He should have been home, but it was an in-service day.

      And fuck the fuss over Christmas break in-service days, honestly. What did he care? Hanukkah had long since passed, and all of the two invitations to do absolutely anything (one from his brother who he hadn’t seen in years, one from the local synagog he had never in his life attended) had gone unanswered, even while they sat still on his kitchen table. The teachers of Jerome Horwitz, however, seemed to enjoy thinking these mandatory attendance days were made by him solely to torture them, the carol-singing schmucks that they were who lived and died for pine needles and eggnog. As such, like they did every year, they piled his desk high with last minute requests and stacks upon stacks of late documentation, leaving Ben with half a mind to string up the staff with lights and leave them to freeze on the roof.

      Ben reached out to open a drawer of his filing cabinet and, when his fingers instead hit the cold metal face and bent backward, he swore, reared back, and wacked it, hard. Fuming, he shook his hand, clenching and unclenching his fist as he tried to work the pain out. He moved towards the window to inspect it. There was nothing broken, and that the light wouldn’t be any better, but it didn’t matter. It was only more out of a desire to not hit the cabinet again that he busied himself with checking the digits.

      From the corner of his eye, he saw someone move outside.

      Ben squinted through the snow as he tried to see who it was, but most details were lost to distance and the well-placed combination of a hat and scarf. They hovered around the school message board, walking back and forth and back again, before grabbing two fistfuls of snow and pounding out a single snowball.

      Ben’s already high blood pressure rose higher still.

      His good hand was on the window latch, unlocking it as the bellow to buzz off boiled in his throat, when the person outside pulled the scarf down from their face to look skywards and he froze.  

      Edith. It was Edith out there, and she was smiling.

      He took a step away from the window.

      He had work. He had work to do, and he should go do it. There were things that needed to be done, and he had to do them. There were papers that had to be filed, deadlines that had to be met. There was work. There were standards.

      Ben hesitated.

      Standards.

      He shut his eyes a moment, taking a deep breath as he rocked back on his heels before returning to the window.

      Edith looked like she was trying to kiss heaven open-mouthed. Tongue outstretched, arms open wide, she pivoted on locked knees to catch snowflakes as they fell. When she succeeded, he wondered if he was actually hearing her laughter from outside or if the sound manifested from his own memory of hearing her giggling echo across the cafeteria tiles.

      Her skin looked raw. Her joy felt raw. If he could garner these things from where he stood, surely the laughter had to be real, right? It couldn’t be in his head.

      He wasn’t so far into this that he could have memorized it, right?

      Fuck.

      Standards.

      Ben hissed through his teeth, gripping his injured hand hard at the knuckles and willing himself to focus on the pain, to move away from the window. It didn’t involve him, this intimate few minutes between her and the snow and her thoughts, and it shouldn’t. Nothing in her world should involve him except her paycheck. Ben knew that, and he’d kept himself keenly aware of it for a while, because something- something he didn’t like, didn’t trust, didn’t want- had been brewing in his chest for months now.

      And here, he found himself teetering on the edge of finding out what that thing was.

      He didn’t move.

      Edith bent down and began rolling a snowball. She rolled, and rolled, and rolled, making a little ditch around the school sign, before stopping to step back and admire her handiwork. Hands on her hips, it looked as though she were chiding the snowball, goading it, teasing it in some way, though he couldn’t fathom why. It didn’t matter though. With her head cocked at that angle, he could imagine that snowy subcategory of glow getting caught up in her eyes, revealing that robin egg blue to be something deeper, something nearly crystalline.

      If he moved away, he wouldn’t have to give it a name. Not everything had to be named, Ben reasoned, had been reasoning, for months. Not everything had to be pulled open and apart. If he just left this alone long enough, it would die in his chest, having never earned itself a title, and he could go on living his life just as he had been and it would be fine.

      He still didn’t move.

      Edith started rolling another snowball, larger this time. He wondered if by chance she had made a mistake, but no, she seemed determined to get the larger ball on top of the smaller one. She deadlifted it, shuffling her feet until she found where her previous work lay, before placing it with deft accuracy. There was a moment where Edith admired her work once more before she leaned to the side and took a bite from the snow that had settled atop the school sign. Her hands went to her mouth, and her shoulders shook, and he swore he could hear her laughter again.  

      It wasn’t until Ben’s nose softly pressed against the glass that he realized he had been leaning in.

      He shut his eyes, face twisting into a snarl as the thing in his chest went ahead and named itself for him. It fluttered almost painfully against the inside of his ribcage, and he pressed his injured hand against it as though he could squish it, crush it, make it stop, but he couldn’t. There was nothing he could do now, it was too late.

      Ardor.

      It was ardor.

      It was a stupid, god-forsaken, piss-poor excuse for an absolutely fucked up crush.

      Ben shivered even while a blush crept across his skin. He felt like he was going to be sick.

      This should not have surprised him. He had known it was coming for a while now, even if he hadn’t noticed the early warning signs. How could he? They were so small, and they were everywhere.

      Edith- just her, her whole self- she was everywhere, settling softly into his life in fifty million minute details, like the individual flakes that made a foot of snow at the stroke of midnight.

      Her handwriting was the first thing he looked for on his desk, her curling combination of cursive and print written from bleeding pens on overly cute, free notepads decorated with bird boxes and hydrangeas. Her laughter kept him company, rolled beside him in the hallways, dancing just three steps behind in vibrant skirts of lace vibratos punctuated by snorts and cut off by hiccups. Her hands in the way they lifted and fell and fluttered like great months, so gentle and soft, decorated in a smattering of scars and sun spots and one mole fixed firmly to the webbing of her thumb. Her eyes- robin egg blue, that specific colour- they followed him, he would swear by it, or maybe they didn’t. Maybe that was all on him. Maybe he just wished they would, whether or not he knew it at first, and how awful was that. It would be Ben’s fault then, for putting emphasis on things that had no meaning, things she did because she just wanted to, or things she was just because she was. It would be Ben’s fault, because it would just be him, alone, caught up in wondering what it would be like to be allowed to-

      Standards.

      Ben swallowed, gripping his tie. He was her superior, though only in title. He could get fired- get blackballed- get his licenses stripped from him. It only took one good argument leveled by one person with a grudge, and honestly, the list of people that would gladly drag his name through the mud was a long one.

      Hell, for this transgression? He’d do it himself. One toe out of line, just one, and he’d take himself out.

      God, what would he do then? Leave the state? What was there to leave for?

      He had nowhere to go, having burned his bridges years ago. That was the problem with lying about being satisfied with solitude; by the time you realized you weren’t better than anybody else, that your anger had gone on long enough, that maybe you were wrong, it was too late. You’d made yourself a martyr, and martyrs die alone.   

      Barring poetic license, the real crux of the issue was that Ben was too much of an angry bastard and a perfectionistic micromanager to allow anyone to ruin his life for him, but he would never admit that. He had standards, after all. He’d ruin his own god damn life, thank you very much.

      And look at how he had succeeded.

      And look at how perfect she was.

      How perfect she was, starting to make what he assumed to be the head now, eating snow off of the sign, caught up in that glow.

      Ben blinked slowly, taking a deep breath as he tried to stop the burning in his eyes, in his throat. This was so stupid, that was what he kept telling himself, this was so, so stupid, and damming, and overdramatic, and awful. He was awful for putting himself through this, for putting this all on her. It didn’t matter if he never told her- and he hoped to never tell her- it was still wrong.

      He had pulled her file once, to find out how old she was. At the time, he wrote it off as curiosity, but looking back, Ben figured it was a subconscious attempt to sway himself and let the whole thing go.

      The answer was that she was ten years his junior, her birthday that coming February making her 35.

      That should have been enough to settle it, but the problem was he kept remembering that sweet story his great aunt and uncle used to share when his mother’s family would meet up at the old beach house over the summers. The two of them, surrounded by a crowd of loving sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, would tell again of how he had been a dentist in the army, and she, his assistant. They’d hold hands, saying, ‘Oh, times were different then. Fifteen years difference didn’t matter much, and nobody made a fuss about stuff like that so long as it didn’t interfere with work. We just didn’t say much about us until the war was over, but when everyone got the invitations to the wedding, well, let’s just say, it didn’t come as a surprise.’  

      Those summers feel like a lifetime ago, and those stories something from a bygone era.

      He keeps telling himself they should stay there.

      It is funny though, in a bitter, weird sort of way. Ben had never really been a skirt chaser, but the few times he had pursued someone, they had all been the same: stick thin, bleach blond, deafeningly loud. Bonus points for blue eyeshadow and big hair. Maybe that was the New Jersey hooligan in him, or maybe it had just been the 80’s, but something about feeling a woman’s eyes rake him like a set of sharpened nails, lip curled in feigned disinterest while she twisted her bubblegum around her finger- that use to set a roaring flame alight inside him. If he’d seen Edith then, he wouldn’t have thought twice about her, but then, he supposed that’s why they said youth was wasted on the young.

      He had been such a fucking idiot, about a lot of things, not that he was better now. It wasn’t so much that his tastes had changed, it’s just he stopped being so caught up in the aesthetic of what he believed power to look like and instead learned to identify what power really was.  

      Hint hint: It was in her hands. It was in the calluses of her hands, and the articulation of her broad shoulders, and the sturdiness of her step, and the way her hip seemed to cock itself like a weapon as one hand curled against it while the other pointed it’s finger almost right up his nose as she told him just how much of an asshole he was being without, herself, succumbing to being an asshole.

      Edith wasn’t beautiful in spite of being 35, she was beautiful because she was 35, because living had made her so. What he held for her wasn’t a youthful flame, it was an overwhelming wave, as quiet and powerful as she herself was, that rose from inside him, rushed through him, and left him smoldering in her wake.  

      And maybe- maybe it was only because he was 45 that he could tell the difference.

      She had fixed the head atop the snowman by now, and Ben found that, regardless of how he felt, he could help but smile. It was a weird looking thing, still appearing so horribly out of order, but she seemed so sure of herself and her work he found he had to trust her judgment regardless. Ben watched as Edith darted across the street to the bare trees there, digging around the base until she found two small, twiggy excuses for branches and a handful of something he couldn’t see. When she came back, she took the branches and made the arms, twisting them until the small stubby ends looking like oddly formed hands rested on what Ben assumed would be the snowman’s hips. She then took what was in her hand and pushed it into the snowman’s head, no doubt giving it a face.

      Would it be smiling? What kind of face would she give it if not a smile? She was wearing that look he by now knew well, though, and he suspected a gleeful sort of trouble was afoot.

      There was a small part of Ben’s mind that told him to check the clock. Time had surely slipped away from him, and from her, and this whole thing really was out of bounds. Inservice days were days meant for getting things done, not avoiding things, and yet he didn’t want to give this up. He didn’t want to let this go.

      But he had to, and he knew that. There were standards.

      Ben took a deep breath, holding in his lungs the moment along with the cold air seeping around the window frame as though he could keep it there, forever, before finally letting it out and turning his back to the snow outside.  

      There was work to be done.

      So he worked, and worked, and kept working, long after the sun had set and everyone else had gone home. Sitting at his desk, he pounded away at the keyboard and signed off on paperwork, focusing instead on the ticking of the clock above the door and the pain in his hand rather than Edith’s handiwork outside and what it would have been like to have been there with her, her watching him, looking at him with those eyes of hers framed in lashes thick with snowflakes that shook when she laughed.

      It wasn’t until Ben clutched the pen so tightly, the plastic snapping clean in two, that he gave up.

      Grabbing his keys and his bag, he walked the halls alone, the clicking of his shoes against the tile being the only sound under the dim and waxy emergency lights until he opened the back door to the parking lot and let the cutting cold go straight through him, let it rush and clean the halls behind him, let it send spitballs and the ripped ruffled edges of notebook paper scattering.

      Looking up, he was greeted with nothing but a dark sky, so thick and distant it didn’t even reflect the parking lot lights.

      Ben took it as a sign and made himself okay with that by the time he got to the car. He was cold and shivering, his breath coming out in puffs while he fought with his keys in the ignition, and it was fine. He was going to be fine. When the car finally coughed and hacked to life, he gripped the shaking steering wheel like it was a lifeline, letting the vibrations go through his hands and ground him to the now. He was going to go home, and he was going to sleep, and he was going to ignore the thing in his chest for as long as it took- as long as it took- until either it died or he died or she left the school or he lost his license- anything was possible, and that was fine, because the outcome would be the same regardless: he was never going to breathe a word about this.

      He was going to be fine.

      And was fine, until, as he was driving away, he looked out his side window and caught a glimpse of the snowman Edith had been working on only to find himself looking at himself. 

      Lopsided and looming, balled fists on its hips, there was absolutely no room for hesitation. Even the snarl, which he realized now was made of chunks of mulch, stretched and warped the contours of the snowy face just as he knew his own face did, just as he knew because he had to wake up and look at that face every day, and clearly, she considered it a thing to suffer through, too.  

      Ben laughed so hard he nearly crashed the car, and as much as he told himself that, well, it was nice to at least know what she thought of him, he couldn’t keep that fluttering thing in his chest from growing.


End file.
